“What makes [the project] exceptional is the reduction of authorship to a team,” says the architect Mark Burry in Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation, a new film by Stefan Haupt documenting the history, present, and future of perhaps the world’s most famous construction site: the Sagrada... View full entry »

Over a hundred years ago, the first ships passed from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Panama Canal. One of the greatest engineering feats ever, the Panama Canal is entering a new stage in its history in order to stave off the threat of obsolescence presented by “post-Panamax” ships, or... View full entry »

The architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre’s extravagant urban mansions in El Alto, Bolivia, have been derided as kitschy-looking cohetillos, meaning “spaceships”—giving his work the nickname “spaceship architecture.”

But the admirers of Freddy Mamani, as he is generally known, say his colorful “new Andean” style has also served to reinvent a city once aesthetically monochromatic, and that he has found a way to bring traditional Andean and Tiwanaku cultures into an urban setting.
— qz.com

"Citizenfour," in fact, enlarges and underlines ideas about architecture, privacy and culture that run more subtly through a number of Oscar nominees. Several [...] movies exploit the dramatic appeal of the constricted, labyrinthine, tightly packed, claustrophobic or paranoid space: the crowded backstage corridors of "Birdman" by Alejandro G. Iñárritu; the tunnels, hallways and dollhouse-like spaces of Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel"; the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Ava DuVernay's "Selma."
— latimes.com

Julia Ingalls argued for The Genius of David Byrne who she likens to "the deadpan docent of the infrastructural realm". vado retro dropped by and chimed in "most of these lyrics were written before i ever attended architecture school and that was a very long time ago. i read a similar essay... View full entry »

Archiculture takes a thoughtful, yet critical look at the architectural studio. The 25-minute film offers a unique glimpse into the world of studio-based, design education through the eyes of a group of students finishing their final design projects. Interviews with leading professionals, historians and educators help create crucial dialog around the key issues faced by this unique teaching methodology and the built environment these future architects will create.

Read our interview with filmmakers David Krantz and Ian Harris about the film, from 9 years ago (!!!) here. View full entry »

Beavercreek, Ohio, nabbed its own infamous place in civil rights history last year, when the Federal Highway Administration ruled that the suburb had violated anti-discrimination laws by blocking bus service from nearby Dayton. [...]

The Beavercreek case illustrates larger, more widespread problems with America’s transportation system [...]. The Kirwan Institute is producing a one-hour documentary exploring the Beavercreek case and how racism can influence transportation decision making.
— usa.streetsblog.org

Depicting the Sancaklar Mosque, commissioned by Sancaklar Foundation and designed by EAA -- Emre Arolat Architects, this film is a semi-documentary salute to this distinguished example of modern architecture, which stands out among Turkey's Islamic places of worship dominated by historicist building typologies.

SGMStudio (Sarraf | Galeyan | Mekanik) has filmed a short documentary on EAA – Emre Arolat Architects’ Sancaklar Mosque -a building that stands out as one of the rare examples of modern architecture among Turkey's Islamic places of worship. SGMStudio’s “Sancaklar Mosque” premiered at... View full entry »

Wim Wenders and a team of directors attempt to show ‘the soul of buildings’, from the Pompidou Centre to the most humane prison in the world, in 3D. But their sickly-sweet results feel more like a series of vapid promo videos
— theguardian.com

In collaboration with fifteen poets and community activists from StartUp Box South Bronx, I recently created Memories of the Future, a location-based cinema project viewed on mobile phones. The group experimented with spoken word poetry, site specific performance, and on-site spectatorship to reframe the predominant view of Hunts Point and speak about possibilities for its future from a position of power.
— urbanomnibus.net

For most of the 20th century, Atlanta was known for its public housing. The city had pioneered the concept in the 1930s [...]

Two decades later, that proportion has fallen all the way to zero. [...]

Looking at these two decades of rapid residential change, Atlanta native and filmmaker King Williams is looking for an answer to a seemingly obvious question. With his in-production documentary The Atlanta Way, Williams asks: Where did all of these people end up?
— theatlanticcities.com

The Competition, which has its UK premiere at the Barbican tonight, follows the trials and tribulations of five stellar practices competing in a doomed bid to build a new national museum for Andorra, back in 2009. As the global financial crisis hit rock-bottom, no job was too small for architects whose dreams of dotting Middle Eastern deserts with their snazzy signatures had been revealed as a hopeless mirage.
— theguardian.com

Unfinished Spaces by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray continues to gain recognition since its initial release in 2011. In addition to previous grants and awards, the documentary film recently won the 2014 Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Award for Film and Video at the 2014 Annual Conference in Austin, Texas. Established in 2013, the annual award is given to the most distinguished international work of film or video on the history of the built environment.
— bustler.net